Category: Reviews

The title is a misnomer: Zwar never actually talked to Rudolf Hess, the former Deputy Leader of the Nazis and Hitler’s chosen successor. His only contact was through intermediaries, whose verbal reports as written down by the author make up much of the book. As history, then, the book exists as mere hearsay. However, by this remote means Zwar managed to obtain an interview of sorts with one of the two most interesting Nazi leaders. (Joseph Goebbels was the other.) It’s therefore of some interest, but not as an historical record.

After his flight to Scotland in May 1941, apparently on a mission of peace, Hess was incarcerated in Britain until the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946. Found guilty on two counts of war crimes, Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent the rest of his life in Spandau prison, in the suburbs of Berlin. Because of the intransigence of the Soviet authorities (one of the four Occupying Powers) Hess was never offered parole or any reduction in sentence. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1987, at the age of 93. He was therefore a prisoner for 46 years, half his lifetime, mostly in solitary confinement.

In the modern age the main interest in Hess is based partly on the circumstances of his incarceration, which was cruel and inhumane, but also on the many strange and sometimes inexplicable details of his flight in 1941, the motives for the flight and the reaction to it of the Churchill government. The official version of events is plausible only so long as you don’t seek confirmation of details, and much of its veracity is undermined by the fact that Churchill put a seal on the release of official papers until 2017). Why was this apparently straightforward (if misguided) event treated with such secrecy? It remains a fascinating subject for discussion, none better than in an investigative book called Double Standards, by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior (Little, Brown, 2001).

Nothing in Zwar’s book answers or challenges the many enigmas set out in Double Standards, and in a dull kind of way probably confirms much of the official version. The matters that fascinate researchers into Hess’s adventure were largely forgotten by Hess, and over the years he gave a string of vague, rambling or contradictory explanations. For most of his 46 years in captivity he was either mad or amnesiac, or feigning both, and in any case he was never possessed of the brightest brain among Hitler’s henchmen. What Hess said indirectly to Zwar is much the same as he said on the few other occasions he was questioned. None of the mysteries is settled here, and there is a sense that events soon overtook him. The crucial action of World War 2 – the German invasion of the Soviet Union – came six weeks after Hess arrived in Scotland, before interrogations of him had barely begun. The American entry into the war came seven months later. He was irrelevant to history almost at once. However, a cloud of intrigue still hangs over him. If anything, Desmond Zwar thickens parts of the cloud, but they are the least interesting parts. In all, a book for Hess completists like me, but not otherwise recommended.

There’s a revealing passage about 200 pages into this novel. In a flashback sequence McEwan’s protagonist Michael Beard is starting his third year at Oxford, when he hears about a promisingly sexy undergraduate called Maisie Farmer. Maisie is reading English, specializing in John Milton. Knowing nothing about literature (he is Maths and Physics), Beard takes a week off and crams as much of Milton as he can manage. Later contriving a meeting with her, Beard dazzles his intended with a tear-wrenching recital of Milton’s poem ‘Light’. He follows this up moments later with the gift of a calf-bound 1738 edition of Areopagitica. Unsurprisingly, he is soon in the young lady’s bed.

The scene is uncannily similar to one in the film Groundhog Day. In this, Bill Murray cynically uses his unnaturally acquired knowledge of Andie MacDowell’s tastes and preferences to try to impress her. Murray quotes (in French) from recently crammed memory a few lines from MacDowell’s favourite poem. They too end up in bed together.

The passage in Solar is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, because it is the sort of territory McEwan has visited before. Here he is once again, aware or half-aware, lifting images or making vague quotations from other people’s works. McEwan, along with several million other people, must have admired the witty contrivances of the Groundhog Day script. Audience familiarity of this sort, in the world of the supposedly challenging literary novel, breeds contentment. Much of the success of McEwan’s writing must be based on this comforting quality: readers seem instinctively to recognize and understand his images, already half-digested from somewhere else. It makes him into a reassuring, undemanding writer.

He has now done the reworking trick so many times that it is beyond accident: he is routinely careless with his sources (admitting once in a TV interview that he fills his notebook with all sorts of odd quotes and references, many of which he has written himself, but many more of which he copies down from other writers). This bad practice became apparent early on his career. It is not formal plagiarism, but in some respects is even worse – it makes him imaginatively secondhand. There was the story ‘Dead as They Come’ (1978) referencing J. G. Ballard’s 1976 story from the magazine Bananas, ‘The Smile’. McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden (1978) was compared by many to Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House (1963). Most notoriously of all, there were the rather too many line-by-line comparisons between certain passages of his novel Atonement (2001) and sections from Lucilla Andrews’ autobiography, No Time for Romance (1977). All this is too close for comfort, and every time it becomes apparent that he has done it again McEwan is diminished by it.

The second reason for our being interested is because it suggests something of the way in which McEwan crams for his own novels. Ever since Enduring Love (1997), McEwan has been including chunks of acquired knowledge in his books. He is no more a science writer (Enduring Love) or a neurosurgeon (Saturday, 2003) than he is a physicist (Solar), but there are many pages of specialist vocabulary, jargon and other references in all of these. Clearly, he has to go and look these things up, or perhaps he meets useful or important people over dinner who then invite him to sit in on a brain operation, or slam around the Arctic on a snowmobile for a week. All novelists research their material but some do it more than others. Historical novelists, for instance, also go in for this kind of mechanically acquired research, and the worst ones in that genre cannot resist downloading and pasting in every last drop of discovered information, however irrelevant to the characters or the story.

Because McEwan can actually write good English, his version of this kind of borrowed material is phrased well enough, but a good style cannot prevent it being dull, irrelevant to the novel, unenlightening of the character and, above all, obviously crammed. And with what intention? Is the author’s motive as cynical as his character’s, to give us a calf-bound copy of scientific mumbo-jumbo, to make us misty-eyed with emotion and surrender our doubts?

Let us move on to a different but not entirely unrelated matter. At the Hay Festival in 2008, McEwan gave a reading from work-in-progress. It transpired that the passage was from this novel, Solar. I was not present, but I heard about it on a couple of blogs by people who had been there and who were eager to mock the great man because of it. According to them the dubious passage concerned an encounter on a train, with two men (Beard, and a stranger) eating potato crisps from the same packet, each thinking that it was his own packet and the protagonist only discovering afterwards that he was the one who had been mistaken. Although at this stage the report of McEwan’s use of this story was for me clearly only hearsay, the extract certainly appears in the finished novel, on pp 121-127 of the Cape edition.

Now, hearsay or not, when I read about this my instinct was one of embarrassment for McEwan. I had first heard this story (which actually involved chocolate biscuits, not potato crisps) from Douglas Adams. He told it to me in 1980 as a true anecdote, something that had happened to him at Cambridge station while waiting for a train. I was amused by it and in all probability repeated it to other people. Not long afterwards I realized that it had all the qualities of an urban myth and although I trusted and believed what Douglas had told me, I soon discovered there were several variants of the story going the rounds. Whether or not it had ‘actually happened’ was irrelevant: it was in vernacular circulation.

I was embarrassed for Ian McEwan because by reading this story aloud at a public meeting he was obviously proud of it, presenting it as an attractive example of his current work. But didn’t he realize what it was? It seemed to me that here was another example of him borrowing someone else’s stuff, but this time in a way obvious to so many that he would only be humiliated by it. However, I also believed that the hostile comments from those bloggers, and other people who were aware of what had happened, would bring it home to McEwan in the nick of time so he could cut the terrible scene from his novel.

As I say, pp 121-127 bear testament to the fact that he did not cut it. Those are seven awful and unoriginal pages. What he did was much worse, unheeding of the advice that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging, and he tried to patch it up. Twenty pages after the crisp encounter, the character Beard makes a speech to a conference. Here we go into a long cut-and-paste use of the author’s research notes, a rather simplistic discourse on the problems of global warming. Bad enough on its own (and tiresomely long), but McEwan adds an extra twist. He puts into Beard’s mouth a second telling of the crisp-eating encounter, then as a peroration contrives some moralistic point from it about the follies and assumptions of industrialism.

McEwan therefore not only reminds us of his own casual use of an urban myth, he underlines its presumed importance. However, at this point it becomes clear that McEwan had been made belatedly aware of his crisp-eating folly, because a new character, one Mellon, suddenly appears and apprises Beard of the urban myth. Mellon voices the objections one would have: he even quotes the Douglas Adams connection, and names it with the title by which it is known to those who collect and categorize urban myths: ‘The Unwitting Thief’. Beard responds with what one might call the Douglas Adams Defence – that against all likelihood, and by some amazing coincidence, this urban myth had actually happened to him. It was real. (Therefore, McEwan’s argument appears to be, all the moralizing was justified.)

But it’s not real, is it? When McEwan wrote it he clearly thought of it as something that actually happened to his character Beard. McEwan had heard the story from someone, then in his habitual manner transferred it undigested into his fiction. Belatedly, perhaps months later, or when someone at the publisher pointed it out, he realized he had been caught out again in the semi-plagiarism that so diminishes him, and he tried to justify it from the mouth of one Mellon.

Ian McEwan presents a peculiarly difficult problem to those of us who see the novel as a demanding, interesting and challenging artistic form. He is clearly gifted: his use of English is always good and at times his prose is excellent. (He’s a much more rounded stylist than, say, Julian Barnes.) But a good style is not enough: compared with writers like Roberto Bolaño, Emmanuel Carrère, Steve Erickson or Daniel Kehlmann, McEwan is timid, unadventurous and derivative. Furthermore, he seems now to be entering the old-age period of being a novelist: making an attempt to sum things up, trying to tackle the issues of the day, showing his awareness of politics and the state of the nation, being obeisant to those who will reward and honour him, and displaying a witless desire to be seen as a sort of semi-critical, but always courteous, member of the establishment. None of this should be the concern of a novel, except incidentally. The role of an artist is impossible to pin down, but it doesn’t include forelock tugging to prime ministers or literary nabobs.

As for his semi-plagiaristic activities, they are to his lasting shame. He should question everything he hears before he notes it down for future use – he should digest it, subvert it, re-imagine it, make it his own.

McEwan clearly now seeks the consensus and has been amply rewarded for it, but perhaps he should from time to time remind himself what his real interest in writing is, or at least used to be. The young McEwan was or seemed to be a gratifyingly anti-establishment writer, who was blessed with a peculiar and slightly nasty imagination, and a gift for the telling image. All that has gone. In this long, tame and often dreary narrative it is hard to glimpse what he once might have become.

Me and Kaminski was first published in Germany in 2003; it was not translated into English until 2008, and this is the paperback edition. Kehlmann is admirably going about proving that Germans have a light and infectious sense of humour, thus overturning the usual lazy British generalizations about Germans. This is not slipstream in the way that Fame (below) was slip, but it has much the same unexpected quality to its writing. The story, such as it is, deals with the attempts of Sebastian Zöllner, a young art critic (who is cunning and determined, but pretty hopeless on, er, art and almost everything else), to meet and interview and eventually write a biography of an equally cunning but famous and eccentric elderly painter called Manuel Kaminski. Up against it from the start, Zöllner, who is rather like a character from a Kingsley Amis novel, becomes increasingly ruthless and more and more unlikely to get his story. Part social comedy, part road novel, Me and Kaminski is not a great or serious work of literature, but it is endlessly entertaining, well written and in its own way highly original. Increasingly, it is ‘foreign language’ writers like Kehlmann, Roberto Bolaño and Emmanuel Carrère who are bringing home the truth, until now apparent to many people who care about serious fiction, but not alas to everyone, that English-language literary drudges like Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Pat Barker and Julian Barnes have been creatively dead for about three decades.

A wonderful example of pure slipstream: innovative, multi-levelled, endlessly amusing, completely original. Kehlmann is a young German writer, currently living in Vienna. This is his third novel. Like all the best slip, Fame more or less defies description, even undermining any attempt to recount the plot. It’s one of those books that as soon as you’ve finished it, your interest has been so piqued by the author’s intrigue that you want to go back and start all over again. And no, it’s completely non-fantastic — everything happens in the here and now, no troublesome fantasy to have to put up with. This is middle Europe in the present day, a world of mobile phones, grumpy authors, assisted suicide, self-fulfilment books and characterless hotels. It is the most enjoyable novel I have read this year. So far.

 

Borowski was born in 1922 in Zhitomir, in Ukraine, to Polish parents. His first book, a collection of poetry, was published in Warsaw in the winter of 1942. A few weeks later he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. He survived the war, as did his fiancée, also incarcerated in the concentration camp. After the war Borowski joined the Communist Party and worked as a political journalist.

The stories in this book (fiction, but obviously and unquestionably based on direct experience) started appearing in 1946, and were published in two collections in the late 1940s. This Way for the Gas brings all his Auschwitz stories into one volume. Because of these stories, and his poetry, Borowski was almost immediately recognized in Poland as a major literary figure, although most of his output later was political journalism. He committed suicide in 1951, still only 29. It is at times a difficult and shocking book to read because of the content, but it is also undoubtedly a work of literature.

Like all great books it is not at all as your preconceptions might lead you to expect. Many of the events and descriptions come as a surprise, and because of our collective assumptions about life in an extermination camp some of it beggars belief, but Borowski was there. This Penguin edition appears to be the only English-language version presently available, and is published by the US branch of the company. It can be obtained through the internet.

I am a collector of books about publishing, but somehow I missed this title when it was first published in 2000. Ms Athill worked for André Deutsch Ltd for most of her life, in the process gaining much respect from fellow publishing professionals as well as the authors for whom she was responsible. The book falls into two general parts: the first is an informal history of the firm and her role in it, the second describes some of the more famous authors she worked with. These include Brian Moore, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul (who later described this book as “feminine tosh”, but not in an unkind way, you understand) and Mordecai Richler.

I must say I found the book something of a disappointment: the story of the emerging indie publishing house is sketchy and incomplete, and her anecdotes about these writers are bland and calculated not to offend. Every negative judgement is immediately ‘balanced’ by gushing admiration for their wonderful works. Even Naipaul, whose lounge-lizard charmlessness is a blight on the art of authorship, gets off pretty lightly.

The book is a surprisingly poor piece of publishing, considering its subject: a dull cover, no interior photographs, no contents page and no index.

Graham Greene used to be one of my most favoured writers until I realized that I disliked more of his novels than ones I liked. The one that ruined everything was The End of the Affair. However, I think most of his short stories are brilliant, and I still like his non-fiction.

The first volume of his autobiography, A Sort of Life, remains a key text. (The standard Greene biography, by Norman Sherry, is an inferior work – it is so bad that I came to the conclusion Greene had subversively appointed Sherry as his ‘official’ biographer believing that Sherry’s long-winded ramblings would put other more effective writers off the scent, at least for a few years.) I came across W. J. West’s book in a secondhand shop and read it with some interest. I have always believed that Greene was the ‘fifth man’ in the Philby defection, and although this book does not go so far as to claim that, there is nothing in it to contradict the idea. I always found Greene’s obsession with Roman Catholicism the least interesting thing about him, but his ambivalent politics remain an enigma.

 

The book is a tie-in with a TV programme, describing the small band of women flyers of the Air Transport Auxiliary, who delivered newly built aircraft from the factories to operational airfields. Of necessity, the young women were nearly all from a slice of pampered and leisured pre-war society, who had had the money and means to learn to fly. The outbreak of war brought down most of the British class system, with not the least impact on these women. They flew any and every kind of aircraft, from single-engined fighters, to seaplanes and four-engined bombers – usually without any tuition, always single-handed (without a crew, even on the big planes). They often had to navigate by dead reckoning. Treated at first with derision by the operational pilots (all male, of course), they quickly showed that they were the equal of any of them.